All the Pretty Horses | Cormac Mccarthy | Life, death, love, horses and hand rolled cigarettes

All the Pretty Horses | Cormac Mccarthy | Definitely a Acquired Taste

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All the Pretty Horses

	All the Pretty Horses Cormac Mccarthy Vintage, 1993 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 293 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

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Life, death, love, horses and hand rolled cigarettes

I can't believe I've waited this long to get into Cormac McCarthy. We Texans have always known him to be one of the great Texas western writers, right up there with Larry McMurtry, earning a place in our hearts. But Cormac is bigger than that. Bigger than Texas, you say? His craft has been compared to Faulkner and Conrad. We're talking about literature here.

After I saw the movie, "No Country For Old Men," I knew I should read this guy and I'd start somewhere near the beginning. I picked "All The Pretty Horses," the first in a series of novels called "The Border Trilogy." John Grady Cole, last of a long line of Texas ranchers is sixteen years old and from San Angelo, Texas, takes off with friend Lacey Rawlins, on an adventurous hero's journey by horseback across country, over the Rio Grande and south into Mexico.

Even though the time period is in the late 1940s and on the cusp of modern life, with cars, trucks and radios, the story is basically a western, with horses, cowboy coffee made over an open fire, guns, and hand rolled cigarettes. I like the sprinkling of Spanish throughout, even though I didn't comprehend it all. It was a nice touch.

I'm not sure if it's the lack of some punctuation such as quotations and apostrophes, or the ultra long sentences, or the full to the brim characters, but it puts this novel in a class of its own. The writing is beyond good, it's classic. For all us regular folks who can't take the high-literary of Faulkner, here's a true and gritty albeit well written western. I plan to read the next two books, and find I can't wait to get into volume two. "Pretty Horses" was haunting, it's emotion and realism hard to stop thinking about.

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Definitely a Acquired Taste

I have looked at some of the reviews here, and am a bit surprised as the number of people who hated this book. It is a challenge to read, but this is no "Ulysses." The main themes can be understood with a little careful attention. Some have compared McCarthy's style to Hemingway's but this is not a fair comparision. McCarthy's prose is far more complex. Hemingway wrote arresting prose, but at times his minimalist style was cartoonish. McCarthy is simple the way Picasso is simple -- that is to say, only if you do not look hard enough.

McCarthy's skill with language is unequalled among living American authors. It is the language that is the star of this book, and if you cannot appreciate the language itself the story will not bear the weight. Yes, I found myself re-reading passages and puzzling out the construction of some sentences, but I did it with the same pleasure a sports fan looks at a replay of a spectacular play. This is a book for the patient. Not every book pays off like a James Bond novel.

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Western for the 20th century

Adventure, full-hearted love, revenge, the majestic wilderness, and of course horses: the western-movie staples are what moves this novel. Yet if All The Pretty Horses is a classic cowboy story, it is also that of a dying world, and all the more accessible to us that it is set in the post-war era.

John Grady Cole, a young man of 16 years, leaves the country for Mexico together with his friend Lacey Rawlins, both on horseback, in search of a life that has become inaccessible to them in Texas. A cruel but romantic saga of tests and tribulations awaits them - which I won't spoil by giving too much of it.

The dialogues are suitably laconic. The characters are frank and unambiguous, except for one key exception. Nature is reserved the richer, more complex, and admiring language. While the novel begins at a slow pace, making the reader wonder whether this is really a back-to-the-wild story, the action later quickens to a satisfyingly gripping climax. One warning: a good part of the dialogue is in Spanish, untranslated; though this won't throw you off the plot, if you don't understand Spanish, it may get annoying.

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Hauntingly Beautiful Search for the Dead West

Cormac McCarthy seems to be everywhere right now--Oprah's book club, a recent Coen Brothers film adaptation, one of the top novels of the past quarter-century. I decided it was time to check out his work, since he's considered the modern Faulkner, and a great depicter of the violent and beautiful American southwest. All the Pretty Horses both lives up to my expectations and kind of frustrates them. The novel starts out gloomy with the funeral for the protagonist John Grady's grandfather, turns comedic when Grady and his friend cross the border into Mexico in search of adventure, then shifts into a semi-melodramatic romance, finally returning to a state of pitch-black gloom and despair. All throughout, McCarthy retains a distance from the world of the novel, coldly surveying the raw beauty of the Mexican landscape and stubbornly refusing to enter the heads of his equally stubborn characters. In some ways, this narrative distance works quite well, amplifying the frankness and simplicity that Hemingway is known for. But it also prevents the novel from striking home on any real emotional level.

The most problematic part of the novel is Grady's passionate love for a ranch owner's daughter, Alejandra. The two are a sort of Romeo and Juliet pair, deeply desiring one another, but knowing that their love can never be allowed to flower. The romance, however, is jarringly out of place with the events in the rest of the novel, and feels a little bit contrived. Especially irritating is the lack of insight into Alejandra's character; she is given no more than a handful of lines, and it is never really clear what she sees in run-down, dirt-poor Grady.

Minor criticisms aside, the icing to top off this striking novel, however, is McCarthy's metaphysical musing that underlies all the events of the novel. Most profound is his consideration of the workings of Fate in human activities. One of the best passages in the novel occurs when Grady confronts Alejandra's grand-aunt for the second time. She is determined to prevent him from stealing off with her protégé, but respects him enough to deliver a haunting and thorough account of her reasoning. She expresses her deep frustration with the randomness of life, describing a coin minter who arbitrarily decides which way to press each coin he makes, blindly affecting countless coin flips down the road. She laments the inability of mankind to ever know the alternative course that their actions could have taken; for a history that never sees the light of day, and can never be judged against what actually transpired. Building off this theme is Grady's fascination with the long-dead frontier of the American West. Early in the novel we see him wistfully imagining the hunting parties of the glorious and departed Native American tribes, disappearing in the red light of the setting sun. At the end of the novel, Grady likewise disappears, fading into history like so many movements whose splendor the world will never see.

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guess I'm not ready for this yet?

I found this book an effort to read. Confusing at the start, yet did grab me midway but I was ready to discard with about 1/3 left, but thought better of it and completed. Yes, his writing is very descriptive and captures the essence of every sense the reader needs to be placed within the story. However, it just seemed to skip and jumble along, the ending wasn't anything like the many my mind conjured up, it wasn't really anything special at all...Grady continued on rambling as did the book. I perhaps need to read another of his works to get a better grasp of the talent of this writer, as so many have applauded his style.

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